“Plaintiff’s third and fourth causes of action alleging “invasion of privacy” claims against the Gothamist and Gawker, respectively, under sections 50 and 51 of New York’s Civil Rights Law, were also properly dismissed for failure to state a cause of action. The blog columns maintained by these defendants each had links to the faculty page on the website of the college where plaintiff teaches which contained plaintiff’s photograph and scholastically relevant personal information. The information at issue—the closing of a popular New York City restaurant and the complaints against it lodged by plaintiff, a local resident and college professor—was newsworthy, and plaintiff’s photograph bore a real relationship to the story. Accordingly, no remedy is available to plaintiff pursuant to §§ 50 and 51 of New York’s Civil Rights Law.”

* State AGs hammer Google over its Street View wi-fi sniffing, with a fine and, perhaps more importantly, various requirements of how Google handles privacy issues operationally. This is all part of the so-called “Privacy by Design” movement, which has never been empirically proven to work but sure has the potential to cost a lot of money.

“an allegation of the disclosure of personal or private information does not constitute actionable damages for a breach of contract claim…Mere disclosure of such information in and of itself, without a showing of actual harm, is insufficient”

* Marketing Land: Microsoft’s “Scroogled” Campaign Against Gmail Wins 0.002% Of Users. Microsoft’s negative advertising against Google (along with most of its other competitive strikes against Google) has always struck me as short-sighted.

* Search Engine Land: Opinion: Why Google Should Crack Down Harder On The Mugshot Extortion Racket. I support Google’s right to configure its algorithm as it sees fit, but its algorithm is misconfigured when non-credible sites like mugshot extortion rackets rank so prominently. Related article.

* Details on Google’s payoff of French publishers to get them to drop demands for a link license.

Related: Search Engine Land: To Avoid Copyright Liability, Google News Goes Opt-In In Germany. As Greg Sterling says, “This approach will enable Google avoid copyright infringement claims and, presumably, any license fees that publishers were hoping to impose on the company. The publishers who celebrated the new law are likely to be very frustrated by Google’s move.”